“I Don’t Love Nobody” is an old-time breakdown, also known as “I Don’t Want to Get Married.” It appears to come from a ragtime song by the minstrel entertainer Lew Sully, who may himself have adapted it from an older song. Sully was born Charles Sullivan in Pittsburgh in 1862 and spent a long career with minstrel troupes in the Midwest and on the East Coast. He copyrighted the song in 1896, and it was printed with a cover picture of him in blackface. Its words are regarded as offensive today. The sung versions that fiddlers kept tell of a man who proposes and is turned down, with the chorus “I don’t love nobody, nobody loves me.”
Southern string bands took it up early on record. The Georgia fiddler Gid Tanner recorded it in 1924, as did the Dixie String Band, and Earl Johnson followed in 1927. Charles Wolfe counted at least six labels that issued it in the early 1930s. The Red Headed Fiddlers, with A. L. “Red” Steely on fiddle and Red Graham on banjo, recorded it too, but their record was issued as “Fatal Wedding.” The Kentucky fiddler Doc Roberts recorded it for Conqueror in 1932, having learned it from the Skillet Lickers’ record. In West Virginia the Tweedy Brothers played it around 1930 on twin fiddles and piano. In the early 1940s Vance Randolph recorded it from Ozark fiddlers for the Library of Congress, and the Ozarks fiddler Art Galbraith later said he had heard many fiddlers play it.
The common setting is in C, but regional versions differ. Texas contest fiddlers play it in A, as in Mark O’Connor’s recording on National Junior Fiddle Champion, and Bob Wills’ setting is in G. Bluegrass musicians recorded it as well. Don Reno, Bill Harrell and the Tennessee Cut-Ups cut it in February 1967 for Rural Rhythm, with Reno taking the lead on guitar, and Allen Shelton and Snuffy Jenkins both recorded it for Rounder. The banjo player Elizabeth Cotten of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, also kept it in her repertoire.
